Dream Lovers Quotes

“The realisation that what are usually called ‘predictive’ technologies are in fact interested more in ‘nudging’ and mapping out the new rhythms of the city than in simply monitoring or surveilling also suggests the need for a new conception of digital time. Armen Arvanessian argues that as a result of digital data time itself – the direction of time – has changed. We no longer have a linear time, in the sense of the past being followed by the present and then the future. It’s rather the other way around: the future happens before the present, time arrives from the future. If people have the impression that time is out of joint, or that time doesn’t make sense anymore, or it isn’t as it used to be, then the reason is, I think, that they have – or we all have – problems getting used to living in such a speculative time or within a speculative temporality. Data technologies do not simply predict the future by guessing what an individual or group might do or want to do in the future. It is rather that those futures already exist, completely realised, and they reach backwards into the present to guide it. The possible paths for our desires to travel are mapped ahead of time by algorithms in the hands of platform capitalists.”
― Alfie Bown, Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships

“The indirect harvesting of valued-per-click leisure time by corporations has led many technocapitalists to support projects like the Universal Basic Income (UBI), which would free up users’ time which could then potential y be spent generating valuable data and content on their own platforms. The driving force of this trend is the Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaigns that have grown simultaneously with corporations like Google over the last 15 years, but now the value of the click is not based only on the likelihood of purchasing success, as older models of Google AdWords and other targeted ad campaigns functioned. Instead, the click is conceptualised as a data-point that connects two or more actors in the network. It is those moments of connection between subjects and objects that have potential value to data-driven companies from corporate advertisers to election meddlers like Cambridge Analytica and policy influencers like Palantir. This only works because the user can be libidinally motivated to conduct the ‘free labour’ constituted by the click. The situation was prophetically predicted by one of the most historically influential Marxists still alive, Mario Tronti. His 1966 book Workers and Capital gave rise to the concept of ‘neocapitalism’, which anticipates the environment in which the digital worker operates today. For Tronti: At the highest level of capitalist development, the social relation is transformed into a moment of the relation of production. In this environment, the data-point connecting two people, generated at the moment of every click between social media pages, connects the social relation itself to a relation of production in real time. Seeing this in his own future, Tronti worried that society itself would run by the logic of the factory. Each interaction between individuals would incorporate a surplus value turned to profit by the class owning the means. dream lovers of social production. If the factory workers could be made to relate to each other in a way that was productive for the factory owners, so too could the entirety of social life be modified and edited for the profit of the capitalists. The whole of society is turned into an articulation of production, that is, the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society.”
― Alfie Bown, Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships

“Indeed, it was perhaps the most iconic scene from any novel of its day, immortalised in engravings and artworks from the period and later. Werther, as Geothe’s narrator, describes the moment of desire in the first person: "I walked across the court to a well-built house, and, ascending the flight of steps in front, opened the door, and saw before me the most charming spectacle I had ever witnessed. Six children, from eleven to two years old, were running about the hall, and surrounding a lady of middle height, with a lovely figure, dressed in a robe of simple white, trimmed with pink ribbons. She was holding a rye loaf in her hand and was cutting slices for the little ones all around, in proportion to their age and appetite. She performed her task in a graceful and affec-tionate manner; each claimant awaiting his turn with outstretched hands, and boisterously shouting his thanks. Some of them ran away at once, to enjoy their evening meal; whilst others, of a gentler disposition, retired to the courtyard to see the strangers, and to survey the carriage in which their Charlotte was to drive away." The focus here is not on Lotte herself, of whom we learn only that she is ‘a lady of middle height, with a lovely figure, dressed in a robe of simple white’. Instead, for Werther what is important is what Barthes would call ‘the arrangements of objects’: Lotte’s relation to the children, the rye loaf, and the knife, all appear as scene-setting props which make desire possible. Lotte emerges from amidst these objects and Werther is ‘initiated’ as ‘the scene’ (described by Werther as the ‘most charming spectacle’) ‘consecrates the object [he is] going to love.’ It is that scene, that arrangement of objects, which makes desire – even love – possible. The technologies of our space, place and time set the scene for love to appear – make the emergence of desire possible. We don’t fall in love with an object in isolation but with how it appears in a curate scene determined by a variety of technologies. The Tinder profile card could hardly be a more perfect example from today.”
― Alfie Bown, Dream Lovers: The Gamification of Relationships